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Saturday, October 25, 2008

The Consultancy Circus

Consultancy, by its very nature, is a multifaceted job. It requires a huge array of skills for a project to be completed successfully and on time - and with all the involved parties satisfied. As the consultancy industry has become more competitive, consultancy firms have been put under pressure to offer a more comprehensive service that will ensure they continue to win new business. This has further broadened the scope of the consultant, who is now expected to manage increasingly complex projects and offer even greater knowledge and support to the client.

Emerging challenges in Project Management

Managing complex projects, responding to change and prioritising projects within a programme or portfolio are among the most pressing issues for executives and technical professionals, according to new data from ESI International.

The figures have been released from the company’s Business Challenges and Hot Topics survey, which covered various levels of government as well as several different industries including aerospace/defence, financial services, IT, insurance, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and healthcare. Shortfalls in programme management and business analysis skills highlight many of the survey respondents’ concerns.

Among the results are:

-- When managing projects, the most pressing issue is managing complex projects, with 44 per cent of participants choosing this response. Close behind come ‘adapting to changing requirements’ (42 per cent) and ‘developing proper metrics to effectively track progress and outcomes’ (41 per cent).

-- When managing programmes or project portfolios, the most pressing issue, cited by 53 per cent of participants, is responding to organisational and environmental changes that impact the programme. Next was ‘prioritising projects within a programme or portfolio’ (45 per cent).

-- When managing business or project requirements, the most pressing issue (38 per cent) is communicating effectively with team members and stakeholders. A similar number (36 per cent) selected both ‘developing and improving business analysis competencies’ and ‘integrating project management and business analysis roles/functions’.

“The survey findings are important for all organisations because of the essential role projects play in driving organisations forward – from organisational change to new product development. Good project management drives success and, important at this economic juncture, helps organisations do more with less,” said J. LeRoy Ward, ESI executive vice president.

“The saying ‘knowing you have a problem is half the battle’ comes to mind. The project manager and senior executive survey respondents know where the trouble spots lie. Now they need to accurately assess their people’s skills and implement initiatives to close the gaps,” said Ward.

The survey also showed differences in project management challenges between the government and commercial sectors.

-- Managing global projects or dealing with cultural issues was cited as a greater concern to commercial organisations (17 per cent) than to government entities (five per cent).

-- Managing risk of high-profile projects is a pressing issue for 36 per cent of government sector respondents, but only for 26 per cent of commercial sector respondents.

-- When defining requirements, implementing a solution development methodology or determining which one best fits the organisation was cited as a more pressing issue to government sector respondents (33 per cent) than to commercial sector respondents (22 per cent).

Sunday, October 12, 2008

The Numerati - interesting!

Journalist Stephen Baker provides us with a fascinating guide to the world we're all entering -- and to the people controlling that world. The Numerati have infiltrated every realm of human affairs, profiling us as workers, shoppers, patients, voters, potential terrorists -- and lovers. The implications are vast. Our privacy evaporates. Our bosses can monitor and measure our every move (then reward or punish us). Politicians can find the swing voters among us, by plunking us all into new political groupings with names like "Hearth Keepers" and "Crossing Guards." It can sound scary. But the Numerati can also work on our behalf, diagnosing an illness before we're aware of the symptoms, or even helping us find our soul mate. Surprising, enlightening, and deeply relevant, The Numerati shows how a powerful new endeavor -- the mathematical modeling of humanity -- will transform every aspect of our lives.
Here is an awesome commentary:
A woman came into my office last week. She's an expert on what's called search engine optimization. In other words, she helps people adjust their websites by putting in just the right words in the right places so that they'll rise to the top of the search results on Google. This is important, because if you or your business shows up on the third or fourth page on Google, you might as well not exist. No one finds you.
She had some bad news for me. The headlines on my blog are terrible for Google. They have jokes in them, irony, references to things that only humans can understand. If I want to get a good Google ranking, I'll first have to make my case, and establish my relevance, to a machine.
I thought about this. In industry after industry, we're being understood and ranked by our data. If the machines cannot find us, the humans never will. Those who figure out best how to organize their data will pop to the top of all kinds of lists. They'll be the first name you see in online dating. They'll be the first choice for the promotion to the Paris office. They may even be the first dog trainer you come across.
For centuries, we developed all kinds of tricks to make ourselves stand out. A whiff of cologne, a firm handshake, a letter of recommendation, a resume with just the right font. That was how we made ourselves findable in the analog age. But now we live in a world defined largely by data. So we have to read the minds of the people who tell the machines what to look for. I call them the Numerati. We have to decode their instructions -- or algorithms -- and then give them what they're after. This type of analysis is going to become the norm in a world managed by the Numerati. If we need any help, you can bet than an entire consulting industry will rise up to help us make our case to machines and hone our own algorithms.

Now, Silicon Valley gets hit

GigaOm.com reports 
"Sequoia Capital, arguably the smartest venture capital investor in business, is sounding the alarm and asking its portfolio companies to buckle down for what could be the worst economic downturn of their relatively short lives."

Thursday, October 09, 2008

YES bank brings RSS-like feature to online banking

To add credit to its focus on innovative banking, YES Bank has launched a new online service called Money Monitor for its customers. The new online account aggregation service allows YES Bank customers to control and monitor multiple bank accounts from other financial institutions as well.
The platform, which can be accessed using a single sign on, was implemented by Yodlee Inc – a banking solutions company headquartered in Redwood City, California.   
For first time in India, through the online platform YES Bank customers will be able to manage their finances across multiple savings, loan, investment and credit card accounts, thus enabling them to assess their net worth regularly.  Customers can access, view, print and receive alerts of all their financial information including online banking, bill payments, brokerage, loans, credit cards, insurance, fixed deposits and reward points information from both YES Bank and other financial institutions though a single user interface. 
In order to register for the services the user has to enter the account information of all his/her accounts while signing in.
Demonstrating the new service at a press conference in Bangalore, Ravi Shankar, EVP & country head, Direct Banking & Cash Management, YES Bank said, “It is very important how services will differentiate and help customers choose a bank.” 

How much molten is tech?

It seems to be a very shaky state of affairs for the global economy and technology in the high-tech industry. What worried economists six months ago, is having them in an outright panic with "economic rescue" plan that may be on the brink of a depression.

A depression? That may be pushing it. But if you believe this has little to do with the tech industry, think again. That mess on Wall Street means it's hard to get credit--whether if you're a giant company looking to make capital expenditures like new server station, or a start-up looking to buy office furniture or put money down for rent. Wall Street has always been a cutting-edge technology buyer, and that spigot is all but shut off for now. Enterprises are announcing plans to trim or freeze spending, and private customers probably aren't far behind.

On top of that, venture capital spending is on shaky ground, mergers and acquisitions in tech are down, and successful initial public offerings on the stock market are as unlikely as they have been at any point since the dot-com bust. What more, after witnessing a steady increase in billing rates for the last few years, Indian IT service providers could face pressure on the pricing front as demand slows down amidst worsening financial crisis in the US, the largest service market.

Already, we're starting to see signs of growing problems. Rumors are spreading of growing layoffs in Silicon Valley that is already having a global affect, and since the third quarter just ended, it's a good bet that surprising earnings shortfalls could be the big news in the coming days.

Nonetheless, while many may fear a replay of the dot-com bust, what could happen to the tech industry over the next year will be different for a combination of reasons: This isn't a self-made disaster, there's not as much public money on the table, and the rate of spending for Web 2.0 companies has been relatively modest when compared to the wild gold rush days of the late 1990s.

Some analysts feel that the US financial crisis will impact in India after December. IT Secretary Ashok Kumar Manoli said that about 35 per cent of revenue of major IT industries comes from Banking Service Finance Institutions world over, with banks in the US having a major share. "It is too early to say about the impact of the crisis on this."

CII Karnataka Chairman S Vishwanathan who is also the MD of John Fowler India said global uncertain economic conditions was bound to affect the domestic IT companies.

The sunshine industry of Indian economy the BPO firms will be hit by the current global economic turmoil over the next few months and now Nasscom have confirmed this fear as well. However the body is quick to turn this crisis into an advantage for the sector in the longer term.

The BPO-KPO sector in India is facing the heat of the US slowdown, particularly following recent events in the financial markets. Businesses of a host of small and mid-sized firms have taken a further hit in the industry since a major chunk of business comes from banking and financial services firms in the US.

According to a report released by Nasscom, the BPO and KPO industry together generated Rs 1,160 crore revenue and provided employment to 7 lakh people in 2007-08. The share of the US in the Indian BPO-KPO export market was 61 percent, making it the largest contributor to exports in the segment in 2007.

Read on… to explore what CIOs from top-notch companies have to say on the impact of the recession and its effects on their enterprises.

Satish Kotian, Head - IT at Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd reacting to the present global financial situation says, "I do agree that with the global recession the first hit of cost cutting will on IT in any organization."

He says when we discuss about the cost we have to understand the component of the same like recurring cost and new investment. If case of recurring cost we have very less option, best thing we can to hard negotiation with service provider.

In case new investment I do agree that there will be rationalization, there will be revisit the existing policies. e.g. if existing policy is of replacement of Desktop / Lap top in 3 years this will pushed to next year or wait till get clarity on environment. In this environment upgrade market will open-up.

On the other side under recession / cost cutting we can push lot of hidden agenda, like deployment of open source application (Open office, Symphony etc).

"In my view if you able to convince the management that this is right time for investment on IT. In recession market bargaining power is tilted towards the buyer. It also time for getting buy in for lot of automation where organization can cut cost in the long run," says Kotian.

In our organization we will undertake following activities.

* Up gradation of system instead of new purchase wherever it is possible
* Deployment of open source e.g. open office, Symphony etc.
* Hard negotiation on recurring cost.
* We may not invest on new application development, but we have to invest on the support module to existing application software.
* Invest in applications for monitoring / Management infrastructure.

Ajay K. Dhir, CIO of Jindal Stainless Ltd in his comments on the US recession and its impact on his enetrprise says that the recession in the Industry is not a new phenomenon, and we have been seeing cyclical ups and downs in the last 26 years that I have worked in India and abroad. The reasons for recession may vary, and for an organization to ride through the troughs successfully, it needs intrinsic strength, embedded processes, fiscal prudence, long term vision and great leadership.

In our case, we as an organization, especially my function, we have processes in place for our budgets and spend monitoring. The IT budget (capex as well as opex) is planned for a three year window, keeping in view strategic as well as tactical objectives of the organization and aligning the IT vision with the same. The budget is discussed with our corporate management team and then presented to VC&MD for approval. Once the approvals are in place, the revenue allocation is done accordingly and the spend monitored. The IT budget is linked to EBIDTA and not just company turnover, hence it is more realistic and performance driven. If any correction has to be done due to market or industry dynamics, then it is aligned accordingly and spend rolled over to the next period. This way, we are able to keep our projects going as well, by keeping our 'ear to the ground' and eyes open.

Vinay Hinge, GM IT of Raymond Limited in his reaction says like our peers in Industry, we are experiencing constraints on spends and to conserve the cash as much as possible. Some of the initiatives we have taken are:

* Transforming Software Asset purchases in to "Rental" models: For example, we have recently converted one of our BI project (Product licenses +Implementation Consultancy) into a pure service model. We would be paying the vendors monthly rent for deploying his tools and expert consulting.
* In-sourcing  of services: Some of the business critical services, which were hitherto outsourced, are now being in-sourced with transferring people from partner to our payroll.
* Deferring of Projects: We are now doing more frequent reviews of our project portfolio and are delaying those projects which are not critical. At the same time, we are re-negotiating the critical projects with vendors for better terms and early delivery dates.

R.D. Malav, VP IT at Jindal Poly Films Ltd. says thet Jindal films has a major export share, and due global recession we are having big challenge to keep our top line and bottom line growth intact, which is very unlikely and change in growth rate is definitely impacting our IT Budget. We have already postponed new Capex for the year. and cutting on recurring expenses also. "Overall IT suffers, if business suffers," Malav reacts.

Ravishankar S, CIO of ING Vyasa Life insurance says that the market conditions, the rapid growth in the Life Insurance industry and the entry of several new players into this segment  require us to remain competitive by launching more innovative products and services - and do so speedily. At the same time we are increasing the reach of existing channels and developing new channels and partners. In this scenario, IT investments will remain critical in supporting these business initiatives.

IT spends in ING Life are determined and approved using strong governance structures such as the IT steering committee chaired by our CEO. These spends are based on our IT architecture blueprint and roadmap that is determined and updated periodically. We  seek inputs and guidance from our regional office in Hong Kong while making these investments. Our shareholders would like us to continue with our ambitious growth strategy.

Overall, this is an opportune time for all companies in the industry to review their costs including the discretionary spending so as to rationalize expenses.  However given the continued strong growth coupled with the need to need to enhance our product/service offerings, there is a need for us to continue to invest in beefing up our IT systems and infrastructure.  Hence we do not see any significant impact on the IT spends.

Daya Prakash, Head IT of LG Electronics Ltd says the electronic major is not having any impact as such as of now.

Nagaraj Bhat, Director, Global Information Services- India Delivery Center at Applied Materials says, "we track our global IT spending to around 3 percent of revenue. We have established a Project Portfolio Review Board (PPRB) represented by the Business Unit leaders  that is chartered to make decisions on projects that will be executed by the IT organizations."

The process starts with Opportunity Assessment and the project would be classified as Enterprise Strategic, Legal/Regulatory/Business Continuity and Discretionary IT Spends. Discretionary Spends are reviewed relative to business conditions. Some of the IT Foundational projects aimed at improving end user productivity, service level enhancements and aligned to the three year architecture strategy and roadmap are given due importance in the prioritization process.

At Applied Materials, we have been making good progress on optimizing our spend in "RUN" and shifting the IT spend to "BUILD" so that we can self-fund some of our foundational projects. For growing regions like India, IT spends are increasing year over year consistent with headcount growth, new market penetration and value engineering activities. Applied Materials outsource majority of its global IT Infrastructure Sustaining Services and ADMS activities to few IT Managed Services providers in India and one of the push has always been to increase offshore/onsite ratio so that we can deliver more for less.

Saturday, October 04, 2008

The great battle in the clouds

In the run up to this month's Professional Developer Conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has started talking up Microsoft's new cloud computing infrastructure. At PDC, MS will unveil a "cloud operating system" that will run .NET applications in the cloud.
Ballmer was reluctant to give away too many details to avoid preempting PDC. He did, however, outline the company's vision. Microsoft already has operating systems for PCs, servers, and mobile systems; the next market the company wants to get into is cloud computing, and so the company needs a new "Internet" operating system. As yet, the new OS has no name, though Ballmer reckoned it would be "Windows something."
The Microsoft CEO said that MS wanted to provide the benefits of browser applications—they're cross-platform and easy to manage—with the benefits of desktop applications—better user interfaces and greater integration. To do this will require a shift in development tools and techniques with the cloud OS forming just one part of the solution.
Some hints of Microsoft's "Software + Services" future have also been given. Although the software giant does not envisage its bread-and-butter desktop applications like Office disappearing any time soon, the company is nonetheless developing services to enable light editing of Office documents from networked locations. This is part of a broader strategy that will see many of its products (SharePoint, Exchange, Dynamics CRM) gain extended online capabilities.

Amazon puts Microsoft in the cloud

Microsoft isn't the only company wanting to put Microsoft products into the cloud. Amazon, earlier this week, announced that its EC2 cloud computing service would soon offer Windows (the real deal, not "Windows something") and SQL Server. The Windows EC2 product is currently being beta tested by a limited number of EC2 customers, launching publicly by the end of the year.
Amazon is citing customer demands for Windows media codecs and streaming media as a key driver for this decision. Windows has a rich selection of media software unavailable on other platforms, including support for many legacy formats. Other customer demands include the ability to run ASP.NET web applications on IIS and SQL Server, to take advantage of EC2's scalability.
This move by Amazon is likely to be more than just a response to customer demands. Microsoft is building cloud computing data centers, and with its cloud platform imminent, Amazon will soon face competition for its EC2 product. By offering Windows, Amazon will preempt Microsoft's entry into the market to retain its lead. And it's not just Microsoft that Amazon will be competing with. For high-volume sites, an EC2 ASP.NET platform is sure to be competitive with conventional web hosting facilities.
Microsoft has large data centers of its own, powering Windows Live Mail, Windows Update, and Live Search, among others; the company can certainly run Internet services on a huge scale and is sure to bring that expertise to bear on its cloud services. Amazon is certainly the more experienced company when it comes to offering cloud computing services to paying customers, though, and it's hard to see customers abandoning the tried—if not entirely trusted—EC2 for Microsoft's version 1.0 platform.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

How to use LinkedIn - a good crash course

LinkedIn is one of the best (if not the best) professional networking platform (yes, its a platform, not just a site, as it has been transforming itself quite aggressively in the last one year and it has on-boarded itself to OpenSocial - and here's a sneak peak exactly how exciting that could get!

I found this cool little post on BNet on how to maximize LI in your NW quest -

  • None. LinkedIn does offer higher-grade accounts for a monthly subscription fee, but don’t upgrade until you’re sure you’ll use it.
  • Plan to spend at least a full afternoon establishing your profile and network. Then make time to check in at least once a week to see what everyone is up to.
  • Your E-mail Contacts: LinkedIn allows you to quickly search through everyone you’ve e-mailed and connect to those you’d like to reach.
  • Well-Defined Goals: What do you want out of your network? Is there a field you hope to move into? A new position you’d like to try? Do you simply want to find other professionals in your field?
  • Your Company’s Policy: While nearly every company is fine with social networking (even the CIA reportedly has its own internal social network), make sure you understand your company’s policy on confidentiality.
Read the full post!

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Paul Newman dies at 83

The star is no more. Paul Newman died today. While he had a number of roles to remember, I always thought "The Verdict" (1982) - Sidney Lumet was one of his best performances. As a drunkard, fallen, failed, aging lawyer who fights a medical malpractice case against all odds and wins, Paul was unforgettable and his last speech in the courtroom was inspirational. Rest in peace, Paul.




Paul Newman, Star of `The Color of Money,' `Hud,' Dead at 83

By Kathryn Harris and Dan Hart

Sept. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Paul Newman, the singularly handsome actor with the ice-blue eyes who starred in such films as ``The Color of Money'' and ``Hud'' while pursuing his interests as a racecar driver, businessman and philanthropist, died yesterday at 83 at his home in Westport, Connecticut, his spokeswoman said.

Newman received a diagnosis of cancer more than a year ago, A.E. Hotchner, Newman's neighbor and business associate, told the Associated Press. Marni Tomljanovic, a spokeswoman for Sunshine, Sachs and Associates on behalf of Newman's Own Foundation, confirmed the actor's death. She spoke in a telephone interview.

Newman portrayed boxers, hustlers and cads in more than 60 films over six decades. He was the popular boxer Rocky Graziano in ``Somebody Up There Likes Me'' (1956), a drifter in ``The Long Hot Summer'' (1958) and ``Sweet Bird of Youth'' (1962), pool shark Eddie Felsen in ``The Hustler'' (1961) and its sequel ``The Color of Money'' (1986), an amoral rancher in ``Hud'' (1963) and bank robber in ``Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' (1969).

He made his Broadway debut at age 27 in ``Picnic,'' but soon abandoned the stage for a more lucrative film career. Newman ``had a face born for the movies,'' director Joshua Logan said.

...............

Thursday, September 25, 2008

An aftermath of the Crash of the Titans

After the meltdown

You take a week off and all hell breaks loose. It's been the story of my life: I leave a terminally placid office alone for a couple of days and come back to lurid tales of fistfights and overnight sackings. I go to Greece for a week, and the whole financial system collapses. Plus, it rains. This might not seem like such a disaster in the great scheme of things, but I still need some sun this year. If you're as superstitious as I am, you might want to consider bribing me to stay in the country to avoid further catastrophe.

Peering through the little window on the world that is my mobile phone screen, it's hard to get a handle on the tectonic scale of recent events. Banks are disappearing like contestants on a reality show. US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has promised to stop the rot by pouring "hundreds of millions of dollars" into the bottomless pit of debt that is the US housing market.

That's a sum that's worth mulling over. It's not even one of those annoyingly precise "$112.7bn" figures where the rounding error represents more money than you and all your friends and family will see in a lifetime. We're not even getting to the nearest hundred billion dollars here, and a hundred billion dollars is a serious amount of money—a Dr Evil ransom demand.

I'm not normally a fan of assessing public spending in terms of how many nurses you could hire or children's hospitals you could build, but with a hundred billion at your disposal you might face a shortage of sick children. Forget building the odd AIDS clinic in Africa, you could pay for all the medication for everybody there who was ill with anything at all. You could send everyone in Britain on a proper holiday. One where it doesn’t rain.

And yet Hank doesn't know exactly how many of these fabulous banknotes he's going to need to print. And to get what? A moon shot? A Manhattan project for climate change? No, a pile of dodgy mortgages held against worthless houses occupied by people with no money. Honest businesses go bust, but the dodgiest money-lending scam in history is propped up by what may be the last hurrah of the golden age of Western capitalism. It's not exactly the New Deal, is it? One wonders how the ideological taunting of "left-leaning liberals" will play out in the coming US election, once the incumbent administration embarks on the biggest socialist project in the West since the Welfare State.

This being the age of the Internet, the columnists and analysts have instantly rushed to print, to tell us "what this all means." I'm happy to admit I have no idea. Can I have a couple of days to think it through, to at least find my A-level economics notes? I suspect it would take the platoons of PhD students months to work out the possible ramifications of this, and legions more in a few years time to discover what did actually happen.

What is clear is that we are entering a period of unprecedented change, and I say that knowing what a cliché that phrase has been for years now. But people often use change as a lazy synonym for progress, and what we are talking about is being overwhelmed, not by the speed of technology but by the rapid unravelling of familiar structures, of whole ways of life even.

Change is the lifeblood of consultancy, so we are inclined to focus on the positive side of it. It's like life: we eagerly anticipate the new qualification, the promotion, the new baby, and the changes they will bring. We're much less willing to dwell on retirement, the empty nest, the loss of income and faculties. As a result, we tend to approach these kinds of change with much less creativity and involvement than we do the "progressive" ones, and are the poorer for it.

While there's going to be an awful lot to do in the coming years, much of it may seem retrograde or tedious. For a start there's going to be a lot of grunt work, welding together "new" financial institutions, where the old ones weren't that well integrated in the first place. New regulation will require the unpicking of years of careful work to cope with regimes that, ultimately, failed to deliver or even to achieve maturity. The new realities of financial life will probably be simpler, certainly starker. Much of the work might seem a bit like attaching a carthorse to a Porsche. It could all get a bit depressing.

I don't want to get overly apocalyptic; the end of the world has been coming in various forms ever since I was a child. But you can't be complacent—drive an hour from where I'm currently sitting and you can take your pick of the ruins of a dozen mighty empires destroyed by fire, earthquake and conquest. Our current nemesis seems a bit dull by comparison. We didn't have a war or even run out of oil, just that largely imaginary and abstract commodity—money.

It doesn't have to be depressing. Adapting to a new paradigm, like aging gracefully, can be a source of great pride and achievement. Our monument can be the appalling mess we got ourselves into—or the way we get out of it.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

"Righteous Kill" - now, now

It took 40 years, but Robert De Niro finally has made a movie that enables him to utter this line: "Rambo the skateboard pimp was my tenth kill."


Am I the only one who's concerned that two of America's greatest living actors are spending their golden years making mediocre to bad movies?


Sounds sad. Hope they would come together again....and in a more elegant way.

Coppola....Scorsese....where art thou?

Friday, September 19, 2008

The story of the pig-pug

This is truly hillarious........

I was rushing to the airport when the courier chap caught me and handed over a couple of attractive red boxes from Vodafone. The box was fairly large and had a nice heft to it and the bunch of us in the car played a guessing game about its contents. I briefly fantasised that Vodafone, having mysteriously found out that I had dropped my cell phone so many times that deep cellular damage had occurred, had understandingly sent me a couple of free phones as a freebie. My colleagues snorted at my naïveté and prophesied it would be a clock. Or a torch. Or some other quasi-useful gizmo.

Anyway, to cut the suspense short, I tore open the box with all the weary boredom of a jaded kid getting yetanotherone birthday present – and we all gazed in to see who was right. Let me put it this way — we were all gobsmacked. Nestled inside was a pig. Yup. A pig. About five inches long and three inches wide, if my spatial memory serves me right. A pig with a blackened mouth, pretty heavy at that, made of some sort of resin. And if an ugly pig wasn’t mystery enough, the pig had, on its back, a small hole and impaled in that was something that looked like a grenade pin. The pig was relayed around the car in a quick pass-the-parcel game and the conversation segued into what this thing could possibly be.

“A keychain for a giant key,” someone suggested. But even if you had been able to lug this around in your handbag, that surmise was shot to pieces by the fact that the pin fell out. With no damage or shrapnel, I hasten to add … it merely looked like a grenade pin. Someone picked up the strange pin with this circular end and peered through it. “Hmm, this is a clue,” she said, “If we can figure out what this is, we will figure out the pig-thingy. Maybe you can use it to keep notes – if you ran out of Post-its, you could pierce a note and pin it onto the pig.” Someone else thought it was some sort of stress-buster – slide your finger in and twirl the pig and gave this a try. The pin shot out and the pig flew, almost braining the driver. “See, you have two of them,” I was told, “Maybe they will send you another one and then you will have the full cast for a fairy tale enactment.”

It was all most intriguing but I wasn’t happy at the thought of lugging this hefty animal around with me so I was about to jettison the mysterious pig in the taxi. But the guessing game wasn’t over and I was exhorted by my bunch of mystified friends that I simply had to take it along for the flight. Alas, the security chaps were a bit startled when the pig showed up in all its porcine glory, the odd pin outlined nicely in the scan. The bag was unzipped and the security guy took it out gingerly and nervously pulled the grenade pin, all the while giving me gimlet glances which quite unnerved me. “What is this?,” he asked, suspiciously. I searched wildly for an answer and came up with “A toy”, stopping myself at the last minute from saying, “Du-uh, I don’t know”. It would too tragicomic, I thought, if I was arrested or shot on suspicion for a pig-thing, the identity of which I have no clue. Luckily the grenade-pin came out smoothly and he relaxed. Not to the extent of letting me take it on the flight, however. He weighed it in his hand and did a couple of reflective bicep-curls and then pronounced that it was a danger and I had to either check it in or junk it. Maybe he thought I would threaten to fling it at the pilot or maybe he thought I would use the grenade pin as a dangerously sharp instrument … whatever, I didn’t pause to find out. I abandoned the pig with a strange sense of relief and loss.

The mystery continued to seize us, however, and grew into an outsized mental itch that refused to go away. I caved in to peer pressure and called a knowledgeable friend. The minute I mentioned pig-grenade she burst into loud cackles and said, “Silly, that is not a pig, it is a pug”.

Oh.

“And that’s not a grenade pin, it is a card-holder.

Oh.

“Hmm, so why are they sending me one of the worst-looking-pig-pugs I have had the misfortune to set my eyes on and why do I need a cardholder?” I asked belligerently?

“To put your visiting card in,” said my friend, patiently, when she had mopped her eyes dry. “And what do I do with that?” I asked, still foxed. “Keep it on your desk,” she said, helpfully. I relayed this information to my eagerly waiting group and after stunned silence, the burst of mirth that erupted earned us some more suspicious glances.

Now here’s a newsflash – I know who I am – I don’t need a pig-pug on my desk, carrying my card on its back like a paper howdah to remind me of my identity. So the mystery continued. Who would need a thing like this? Maybe if you were a frontline staff at a hotel or a bank? Then a customer would figure out who you were and could read out your name, assuming the customer was not discombobulated into speechless horror at the sight of the pig-pug. That is a possibility, I suppose. But why Vodafone should assume that most of its customers are frontline staff is another mystery, which I have no energy to delve into.

I still have no idea where this pig-pug promo fits into the marketing strategy. I could call and ask my friend more details into this mystery. But guess what, ever since I moved into this high-rise in Bangalore, my cell signal is … shall we say … a tad erratic. I find that if I lean out of the window at a particular spot, and hold my head in a spondylosis-inducing angle, then the signal works. If I move my head ever so slightly, or do this teeny-weeny shift in my stance, the call drops. For a while, most of my conversations had long patches of silence from my end which earned me huge undeserved compliments of being an excellent listener, till everyone caught on. The loss of signal makes the whole “wherever you go” tagline rather ironic, I suppose, but that’s another story.

Maybe the parcel should’ve come with an instruction manual explaining what it was supposed to be. On the other hand, we might not have had so much fun. Maybe, even as I write, there are Vodafone customers all over the city (the ones who know who they are and who are not frontline staff) playing “guess what the pig is” games, whiling away the time as they wait for a signal to materialise. Or maybe it really is a stress-busting device –I could drop it and stomp on it each time the call drops and that would make me feel so much better that I might not even complain, thus taking the load off the call centres – oh, but I can’t get through anyway, because of the no-signal issue, remember? Sadly, I am now bereft of my pig-pug – by the end of the saga I had become almost fond of its ugly face. I suspect I might have enjoyed having it around to remind me of the unintended hilarity caused by an incredibly weird promo, but that’s life. Somewhere in the garbage heap of the airport sleeps a forlorn pig-pug with (or without) a pin in its back. Goodbye pig-pug.

(Radhika Chadha is a consultant in strategy and innovation and the co-author of Innovative India: Insights for the Thinking Manager. Karate-gy is the proprietary name of the strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow Ltd. )

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Kala Patthar!!

West Bengal is the largest producer of coal in India. And guess what, now we import coal from abroad!

Ain't our tax rupees well spent, comrades!

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Web 3.0? That too with a formula?

While the versioning looks a bit aggressive, the content is extremely relevant, meaningful and written from a deep-rooted understanding of the web as a strategic platform to win competitive advantage. A must-read for tech stretegy enthusiasts -
(Author is a Forbes columnist)

Here is a follow-up post on that
http://www.devx.com/semantic/Article/39109?trk=DXRSS_XML

Indian Retail - to organize or not to organize

Nice read - http://indianeconomy.org/2008/09/04/resuscitating-indian-retail-industry/

Unorganised and organised retail must coexist and flourish in India…

After almost scaring the Tata Motors away from West Bengal, Mamata Bannerjee has now trained her guns on Reliance Retail. Well, Reliance Retail should be used to being targeted by feisty women politicians. Immediately after coming to power in Lucknow, Ms. Mayawati had earlier undertaken a similar exercise in UP.

All this is taking place when behemoths of international retail are trying to enter the Indian market. Tesco has chosen to come with Tatas, while Reliance has tied up with Wincanton. The big daddy of them all, Wal-Mart is coming to India courtesy the Bharti group.

In the September edition of Pragati-The Indian National Interest Review, Prashant Kumar Singh makes significant observations about the confusion surrounding retail industry in India. He rightly notices that-

The debate over retail in India has been fixated on the growth of organised retail, entry of international retailers and concomitant demise of the traditional retailer. The spectre of ogres like Wal-Mart gobbling small retailers has completely paralysed the government on the policy formulation front; not because of any real concern for small retailers but more out of their perceived political clout. This lack of policy initiatives for boosting and regulating organised retail is unfortunately based on the fallacy that modern retail and unorganised retail are necessarily antagonistic.

…Available data provides sufficient evidence that traditional retail is under no immediate threat from organised retail. With the present rate of growth of organised retail of 45 percent per annum, any structural changes brought about by gradual policy shifts will take at least a decade before unorganised retail feels the heat. This assessment is not to condone continued government stupor towards the unorganised sector on the issues of credit availability, access to distribution channels, and realisation of fair price for the produce. It is, instead, meant to spur the government to initiate concrete measures to support the traditional retailers.

…Given the benefits of organised retail, the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) needs to be analysed. It is fallacious to prescribe FDI as the panacea for all the ills plaguing organised retail. The eagerness of international giants to enter Indian markets can be attributed to saturation of the developed markets and low penetration of formal retail in India. The entry of FDI in retail will tilt the balance between suppliers and retailers, force smaller players to adapt and differentiate, and bring consolidation in the sector. The accompanying direct benefits are substantial: increase in exports due to high level of sourcing from India, incorporation of global best practices, investments in the complete supply chain–especially in technologies relating to cold chain, food processing and IT, increase in product variety and categories, increase in employment, and secondary benefits of modern agriculture and shopping tourism. Moreover, this FDI in retail will arrive without any sops and tax breaks from the government, unlike IT and auto-manufacturing sectors, where state governments have been bending backwards to attract investments.

Prashant Kumar Singh makes a strong case that with the right government policies in place, “the ecosystem of the retail industry in India will then adapt itself to accommodate the two seemingly divergent strands of retailing, evolving into an indigenous Indian retail model”. To read the complete piece titled “Retail in Doldrums“, download the community edition(pdf) of the latest issue of Pragati-The Indian National Interest Review.

Friday, September 05, 2008

Google Chrome, and "all that is called Google is not gold"?

Source - http://www.businessweek.com//technology/content/sep2008/tc2008093_489920.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Some are calling Google's (GOOG) new browser Chrome an "Internet Explorer killer." Others venture further and call it a "Windows killer." Whether Google's newly launched browser has Microsoft (MSFT) quaking is unclear, but there's no doubt that Google is serious about "organizing the world's information"—and is prepared to shake up the status quo in the process.

It should come as little surprise that Google is entering the Web browser market. The search heavyweight already has a substantial stake in our online activities. Search, check! E-mail, check! Office documents, check! The list of Web applications offered by Google is both long and varied. With its goal of providing all of our online needs, it makes perfect sense that Google would step up and provide a Web browser built to accommodate its applications. With Chrome, Google is betting that more of us will move more of our computing from desktops to online, relying on the vast data centers known as "the cloud." But can Google's Web browser singlehandedly entice us to dump a favorite Web browser and our computer's operating system?

Let's start with the operating system. What's your favorite flavor? Windows, OS X, Linux? Whichever your allegiance, for at least the next several years, you'll need an operating system to boot your computer and store the applications that are still too large and unwieldy to run from inside the cloud. Take iTunes, Photoshop, or PowerPoint. While online equivalents exist, they just can't match the processing power and functionality that come from the applications you run from your computer's operating system.

SEGMENTING ONLINE ACTIVITIES

And, while Google Chrome's strength comes in its ability to segment online activities—an open tab playing a live video stream won't slow down the remainder of your Web browsing—it still needs an operating system at its foundation. For evidence that Google Chrome is not yet ready to replace an operating system, consider the browser's limitations at launch. Despite two years of hard work, Chrome can't run without Windows and it won't run at all on Apple's OS X or Linux.

Then comes the question of Chrome's potential for wresting market share from Google's rivals. Can Google really launch a new browser and expect to grab some of Internet Explorer's 72% Web browser market share and Firefox's 20%? Chrome certainly started off strong. On its opening days, according to analysts at Lehman Brothers, free downloads reached an astounding 2% of the market. Lehman predicts that the new browser could reach 15%-20% market share in just two years. In other words, it's likely to be big, but not dominant.

What's more, Google Chrome is not yet proven as a revolutionary Web browser. Google technicians emphasize that its architecture is different, and predict that it will handle computing intensive software applications better than its rivals. But most of the Web surfers who downloaded it on its first day came to face to face with a bare-bones browser with few of the add-ons and plug-ins available on the others.

BRAND OF GOLD

What Chrome can boast is the Google brand. While not everything Google touches turns to shareholder gold, its brand works wonders. The company could launch a new brand of laundry detergent, and we'd likely clear grocery store shelves of the stuff. You can bet that Google's fans will jump at the chance to download a Google-branded browser, so they can check their Gmail, look-up their Google Maps, and search for laundry detergent on Google.com.

It's our infatuation with the Google brand, more than the technology inside, that will boost Chrome's market share and further extend Google in our daily Web activities. As for being a Windows or Internet Explorer killer, don't count on it.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

Steve Jobs - you can't write him "off", Bloomberg!

Apple fans, tech aficionados, corporate trackers and Internet readers all over the world were crestfallen when they read about an obituary of tech czar Steve Jobs which was fired by financial newswire Bloomberg to its subscribers. ( Watch )

Had the man who reinvented himself, a moribund Apple Inc, and just about every rule in the game of personal electronics with iPod, and then in telecom with iPhone, finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer?

No, the man was alive and kicking even as a red-faced Bloomberg -- usually sharpshooters when it comes to financial news -- had missed the mark by miles.

The gaffe happened when the American agency decided to update its 17-page stock obituary on Steve Jobs, and someone accidentally published it in the process. The story, which was meant to be sent to Bloomberg's internal wire, accidentally slipped out to its subscribers. And all hell broke loose!

The story that ran 'Hold for release' - 'Do not use' couldn't actually have been stopped as it was simply too big for global financial markets. The jitters subsided later when the agency promptly retracted it.

The story was titled “Steve Jobs, Apple Co-Founder, Arbitrator of Cool Technology, XXXX” and had a byline of editor Connie Guglielmo. The obituary had marked blank spaces for Jobs's age and cause of death to be filled in. It traced his life, achievements and surprisingly had quotes from rivals like Microsoft's ex-chairman Bill Gates.

As it transpired, Jobs was clearly hale and hearty, even though he has previously battled pancreatic cancer, raising inevitable concerns over his health.

Gossip website, Gawker.com was one of those which picked up the obituary and published it, from where it was picked up by many blogging sites. Later, it also printed the retraction by Bloomberg, including the original notes, which was quick to come by.

Bloomberg editors Joe Winski and Cesca Antonelli sent out an apology of an apology: "An incomplete story referencing Apple Inc was inadvertently published by Bloomberg News. The item was never meant for publication and has been retracted.”

Though no major harm was done: Few people recoiled in horror, fewer still gasped as the mainstream media seemed to have missed the little ‘devil’ of a news. And no, Apple stock did not crash!

But the Internet media was quick to lap up the gaffe, and announce tongue in cheek, that Apple's iconic CEO had clearly come back from the "virtual jaws of death", an euphemism that succinctly outlines the harsh competition permeating modern journalism.

Though common journalistic practices involve preparing obituaries of famous personalities, celebrities and politicians, but this has been the biggest goof-up of its kind in the annals of world journalism.

The incident did serve as a reminder about people’s worries over Jobs' health in the past few years.

We reproduce a part of much-talked about ‘obituary’ that Bloomberg sent out accidentally.

JOB, STEVE. APPLE FOUNDER, TECH VISIONARY. UPDATED AUGUST 2008

HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE - HOLD FOR RELEASE - DO NOT USE

Steve Jobs's birthday: Feb. 24, 1955
BIO UPDATED AS OF 2008, by Connie Guglielmo

APPLE PR CONTACTS: Katie Cotton — -redacted- and Steve Dowling: -redacted- or -redacted-
People to contact for comment:
- Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: -redacted-
- Jon Rubinstein, former head of Apple's iPod division. He's now
chairman at Palm. Contact Lynn Fox in PR.
- Heidi Roizen: venture capitalist who once dated Jobs: -redacted- or -redacted-. Heidi knows a lot of Silicon

Valley insiders and may put us in touch with others, including
A C Mike Markkula, the first VC to back Apple.
- Larry Ellison of Oracle (one of his best friends); contact
Deborah Hellinger in Oracle PR. -redacted-, -redacted-

- Jerry Brown (personal friend) and California AG. Try GARETH
LACY at -redacted- IN OAKLAND; -redacted- CELL, -redacted- or press office: -redacted-

- Al Gore: member of Apple's board of directors
- Bill Gates: Microsoft was among the first developers of Mac
software
- Bob Iger at Disney: who bought Pixar from Jobs
- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and member of Apple's board. Send
note to -redacted- or try David Krane: -redacted- or -redacted-

- Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel Corp (Apple began using Intel
chips in its Macs in 2006). Contact Tom Beermann: -redacted- or
Bill Calder on -redacted-. Both in Intel PR
- Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Contact Shawn
Dainas in PR: -redacted-
- John Lassiter and Ed Catmull: Pixar-nee-Disney executives. Try
Zenia Mucha, -redacted- or Jonathan Friedland, -redacted-, in
corporate PR at Disney.
- Guy Kawasaki, one of the first Apple evangelists -redacted- or -redacted-

- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, who bought an early circuit
board for the game Breakout from Jobs and Wozniak. (pr is being
handled by his daughter, Alisa Bushnell. her cell is: -redacted-; work is -redacted- work/message;-redacted-)

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Even God can't save this Country!!

From http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/aug/05house.htm

"Even God will not be able to save this country," a fuming Supreme Court on Tuesday said while slamming the government for its refusal to amend the law for launching criminal prosecution against those who illegally occupy official houses.

"We are fed up with this government," the apex court said, adding, "They don't have the guts to differ with the opinion of the clerks."

"Even God will not be able to save this country. In India even if God comes down, he cannot change our country. Our country's character has gone. We are helpless," a bench of Justices B N Aggrawal and G S Singhvi said.

The apex court said PILs are being filed before it by people who are vexed with the approach of the government on various issues.

"You complain about judicial activism when you are in power. When you are not in power you come to us for remedy," the bench said.

The bench gave vent to its anger as Additional Solicitor General Amarender Saran bluntly told the court that the Centre had decided not to amend Section 441 IPC (criminal trespass) for prosecuting squatters of Government accommodation in the country.

The government took the stance that the existing provisions provided under the Public Premises Act was sufficient to evict those unlawfully occupying government accommodation.

Moreover, it claimed that out of 99,100 government houses only 300-odd dwellings were under unauthorised occupation for which had been made to evict them. But this did not satisfy the apex court which said the Government does not have the guts to take on the offenders

Saturday, August 02, 2008

The best review of The Dark Knight

This is copied from http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/what-doesnt-kill-you-makes-you-stranger-heath-ledgers-joker/


Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers.

***

It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is useful but not explanatory, and Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker has already become legendary despite the fact that we don’t really know what is legendary about it. An attempted discussion at The Valve died out amidst cries that comic books are kids’ stuff (or maybe FASCIST!), and our friend Scott at Acephalous showed wonderful enthusiasm tinged with unmistakable vertigo. Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.

I’m going to start from the premise that Batman’s acting and psychology in this film aren’t very interesting. Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion, and he doesn’t develop because he did all that in the first movie. Instead, it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film — he is the fixed quantity, the “immovable object,” with which the Joker dances. Furthermore, the secondary plot of the film, involving Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face, falls way short of Batman’s chemistry with the Joker. (This is partly due to Aaron Eckhart’s limitations as an actor, which are considerable. He appears to get his ideas for characters from their summaries on Wikipedia.) Thus everything revolves around the Joker. The film forces us to return to him obsessively.

In an interview with Fear.com, Ledger announced that he and Christopher Nolan had “the same idea” about the Joker, but refused to elaborate.

What is the meaning of what Ledger has left us?

***

I advise you to hire a poet.
-
Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust

First, it must be said that the Joker is much, much smarter than Batman. Not only does he guess every move that Batman will make throughout the film, adjusting his own actions accordingly, but he shatters the fundamental assumption of any superhero film, which is that superheroes don’t kill supervillains because they (the heroes) are finally so dominant that they have the luxury of mercy. In The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill The Joker because the nature of the separation between the Joker and himself is just too tenuous, and he has to enforce that separation by refusing to kill. The Joker happily calls his bluff, leading to three scenes where The Joker wins by showing no concern for his own life (four if you count the grenades in his jacket).

The reverse is also true, though — The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other — I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people — Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

Insofar as we can untangle the Joker, the story goes something like this: It is the nature of the self to be melancholic, and thus to long for a return to a critical point of origin, which, if lost, would leave a void threatened by madness. As a result, the individual tries to go back to a point of origin that he has (for all practical purposes) invented, lacerating himself in the process, and so actually becoming the scarred, exiled creature. At the same time, the individual, despite his scars, gradually is able to come closer to the illusion of being identical with his fantasy. Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown. The main thing enabling Batman to remain both people without a psychotic breakdown is the Janus figure of the gatekeeper, Alfred, whose two-facedness in this film (part butler, part CIA scorched-earth man) earns him the name in all its fullness.

The role of time in this psychological process is pretty confusing, but there are lots of examples that can help us see our way forward. For example, in the film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character Jack is trying to recover the manhood that he’s lost to consumerism and the working week. This desire splits off into a persona of its own, named Tyler Durden, who Jack imagines to be Brad Pitt. In order to be Tyler Durden, and thus to recover his own primordial self, Jack has to put himself through physical ordeals (mostly savage fistfights) that smash him (and his life) to pieces but make the Durden aspect of his personality, still represented as an unharmed Adonis, more and more totalizing. In The Dark Knight, the Joker shows up at a meeting of crime bosses from whom he has just stolen $68 million. One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled: the two things are one and the same, except for the split between the logic of insanity (the Joker as Adrian Brody’s pianist, performing at gunpoint) and practical thinking (the Joker defends himself against an immanent threat). The fantasy of innocent “magic tricks” is realized at the precise moment when it has utterly failed and been replaced by calculating violence. It is a version of what characters experience in Jean Genet’s novels: when the drag queen gains enough aesthetic sense to become, at last, an elegant jeune fille, he is a middle-aged man. When Harvey Dent truly becomes Gotham’s patron saint, he is a dead murderer.

The Joker would like to be completely mad, and so feel no cognitive dissonance at all; when he is accused of being mad, and replies “I’m not — no, I’m not,” his voice is heavy with regret. Even the stories that he tells to Gamble and Dawes are lucid in their very ridiculousness. Consider the story he tells to Gamble: while his father is beating up his mother, the mother defends herself with a kitchen knife, which then inexplicably causes the father to take the kitchen knife and begin ritually carving up his son’s face. What is supposed to be a story about torture and abuse turns into a story about the envy of the excluded: the little boy re-writes the story to make himself the center of attention, introducing a twist that has its own horrible fascination but actually doesn’t “fit.” This is precisely what Batman has done — turn the selfless work of upholding the law into a spectator sport with him in the middle. The second story not only features the Joker scarring his own face rather than trying to undo the damage to his wife’s face, but involves the Joker getting what are clearly external scars by sloshing a razor around inside his mouth. The union of the internal and the external is what Batman wants out of fighting crime, at Hancock-like cost to those around him.

***

In the first film, Batman fought human agents of totalitarian order; here, he fights an anarchist in love with the fireworks of chaos and the excesses of image. My sincere hope for the final installment is that Batman will face off against something inhuman, by which I certainly do not mean campy monsters. It seems to me that the inhuman is also the best possible lead-in for Batman’s conflicted relationship with the person who shares his denatured humanity — Catwoman, invoked slyly here by petitpoussin. (Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.)

That said, what we make of Nolan’s trilogy will be greatly affected by whether we continue to overvalue films like Iron Man. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland existed to make Americans believe that the rest of America was real; by the same token, risk-free parables like Iron Man and Harry Potter, towards which we feel genial disbelief, disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives, and which comprise the glistening heart of The Dark Knight. I mean our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares, our faiths. It is because we are having trouble dealing with Ledger’s Mephistopheles, his tongue snaking around his lips, that we hear so many empty words about his “great performance” in a genre where “the movie is only as good as its villain.” Nolan thinks we deserve a better class of superhero movie: not the kind we need to preserve us in our delusions, but the kind we deserve.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Donal Trump doing a CPM?

From Forbes.com

LONDON - Michael Forbes was until recently an unknown fisherman in an obscure town in the north of Scotland.

Obscure, that is, until the day billionaire Donald Trump, who has Scottish roots, showed up at his footstep with a big, fat check ($900,000) to buy his rundown 23- acre property--as it stands in the middle of Trump's golf course ambitions.

Trump's project includes two championship courses, a five-star hotel, a golf academy and spa, 950 time-share vacation villas and 950 holiday homes that will sell for a minimum of $1 million.

Forbes, a proud salmon fisherman who works from sunrise to sunset, told Forbes.com Trump is messing with the wrong man.

"He knows it's not for sale ... I haven't had second thoughts, and will never have," Forbes said, recalling the days when Trump allegedly sent "bullies" to his property to try to push him out. "They told me they would make my life a misery."

He recalls how Trump went "mental" because he wouldn't sell his house and that's when it got personal. "He really pissed me off. I would rather give it away than to him. He picked on the wrong guy," said Forbes, whose family has lived in the sand dunes at Balmedie, Aberdeenshire for 40 years.

Forbes, who has no connection to Forbes Media LLC, became a symbol of defiance and proud Scottish nationalism. Outside his property a sign reads "No Golf Course" and he embodies the feeling many Scotts have against the power real estate developer from New York City.

Feelings that have transpired this week as a public inquiry led by the Scottish government will have the final decision to give the okay to Trump's plans. Dave Morris, an environmentalist, spent some time questioning Trump on his development plan.

"He seemed to have no idea of the rights to public access over his land," Morris told Forbes.com. Under Scottish right-to-roam law, members of the public have right to wander all over Trump's golf course.

"He showed complete ignorance and said he was ready to make no concessions," Morris said. The inquiry is expected to last a month. But even if the government rules against the project, politicians still have the power to overrule the decision on the basis of economic gain.

As for the ongoing public inquiry, Forbes said: "I reckon they will vote against it. And Trump will have to pack his bags and go home."

Too bad Trump didn't leave a number where to be reached just in case on a remote day Forbes changed his mind.

Saturday, January 12, 2008

Mike Nichols is back

The highly talented Mike Nichols is back as a director once again, and this time with Charlie Wilson's War. The cast is, as expected, fantastic with Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and the unforgettable Seymour Hoffman. Reviews are good and the film a nice different touch as always with Nichols. He has proved himself time and again with different genres, like The Graduate, Catch-22, The Birdcage and Wolf - all as different as possible. This time its a political movie and as Dan writes here, Mike seems to have pulled another winner! Highly recommended!!

Pontigrity (from Once upon a Time in Asstralia)

"Johnny, Johnny"
"Yes, Papa"
"Eating sugar?"
"No, Papa"
"Telling Lies?"
"No, Papa"
"Open your mouth"
"I think if you are actually questioning my integrity ..., you should not be standing here."

No points for guessing who the Johny is!!!